Historically, telecommunications have involved the transmission of voice, fax and encoded data signals over a network dedicated to telecommunications, such as the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) or a Private Branch Exchange (PBX). Similarly, data communications between computers have also historically been transmitted on a dedicated data network, such as a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN). Currently, telecommunications and data transmissions are being merged into an integrated communication network using technologies such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Since many LANs and WANs transmit computer data using Internet Protocol (IP), VoIP uses this existing technology to transmit voice and fax signals by converting these signals into digital data for transmission over an IP network.
Although integrating telecommunications into existing data networks provides many advantages, this new technology also presents some problems due to a lack of common standards. One such problem arises when a telephony device transmits IP packets having a different payload size than the payload size used by other telephony devices on the network.